Due to various added advantages over the conventional material removal processes, non-traditional machining (NTM) processes have now been widely applied in different manufacturing industries. To achieve the desired response values, it is always recommended to operate these NTM processes at their optimal parametric settings. Various single response optimization techniques are already available to determine the optimal combinations of NTM process parameters for achieving maximum or minimum value of a single response. In this paper, a multivariate quality loss function approach is adopted for simultaneous optimization of responses for three NTM processes. It is observed that this approach outperforms the other multi-response optimization techniques, like desirability function, distance function and mean squared error methods with respect to the achieved re-sponse values. With modification of the corresponding objective function and constraints of the de-veloped non-linear programming problem, it can be effectively applied to any non-traditional as well as conventional machining process as a multi-objective optimization tool.

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.